PRESS CONFERENCE - LOCATION CHANGE!

Since the court system assigned us a judge in San Jose,
rather than San Francisco, the location of the press
conference in the OPG v. Diebold case has changed to
the location listed below.

EFF invites media professionals in the San Francisco Bay
Area to attend a press conference immediately following the
ruling of the judge at the federal courthouse on the motion
for a temporary restraining order to prevent Diebold from
sending further specious cease-and-desist notices (see media
release below for more details).

For Immediate Release: Monday, November 3, 2003

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release

San Francisco - A nonprofit Internet Service Provider (ISP)
and two Swarthmore College students are seeking a court
order on Election Day tomorrow to stop electronic voting
machine manufacturer Diebold Systems, Inc., from issuing
specious legal threats. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw
Clinic at Stanford Law School are providing legal
representation in this important case to prevent abusive
copyright claims from silencing public debate about voting,
the very foundation of our democratic process.

Diebold has delivered dozens of cease-and-desist notices to
website publishers and ISPs demanding that they take down
corporate documents revealing flaws in the company's
electronic voting systems as well as difficulties with
certifying the systems for actual elections.

Swarthmore students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith have
published an email archive of the Diebold documents, which
contain descriptions of these flaws written by the company's
own employees.

"Diebold's blanket cease-and-desist notices are a blatant
abuse of copyright law," said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy
Seltzer. "Publication of the Diebold documents is clear fair
use because of their importance to the public debate over
the accuracy of electronic voting machines."

Diebold threatened not only the ISPs of direct publishers of
the corporate documents, but also the ISPs of those who
merely publish links to the documents. In one such instance,
the ISP Online Policy Group (OPG) refused to comply with
Diebold's demand that it prohibit Independent Media Network
(IndyMedia) from linking to Diebold documents. Neither
IndyMedia nor any other publisher hosted by OPG has yet
published the Diebold documents directly.

"As an ISP committed to free speech, we are defending our
users' right to link to information that's critical to the
debate on the reliability of electronic voting machines,"
said OPG's Colocation Director David Weekly. "This case is
an important step in defending free speech by helping
protect small publishers and ISPs from frivolous legal
threats by large corporations."

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed by
Congress in 1998, provides a "safe harbor" provision as an
incentive for ISPs to take down user-posted content when
they receive cease-and-desist letters such as the ones sent
by Diebold. By removing the content, or forcing the user to
do so, for a minimum of 10 days, an ISP can take itself out
of the middle of any copyright claim. As a result, few ISPs
have tested whether they would face liability for such user
activity in a court of law. EFF has been exposing some of
the ways that the safe harbor provision can be used to
silence legitimate online speech through the Chilling
Effects Clearinghouse.

"Instead of paying lawyers to threaten its critics, Diebold
should invest in creating electronic voting machines that
include voter-verified paper ballots and other security
protections," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn.